


Safely To Arrive At Home

by bessemerprocess



Series: Songs of Loudest Praise [1]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Community: purimgifts, Episode Related, Gen, Mathematics, demographics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 02:13:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/pseuds/bessemerprocess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andi Swan falls in love with numbers long before she falls in love with people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safely To Arrive At Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LoveChilde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveChilde/gifts).



Andi Swan falls in love with math when she’s thirteen years old. She loves the way the numbers fall into place, and she loves it even more when they get her out of her small town and into the big city. Numbers might rescue her from a future of small town life, but the city shows her that those numbers are people, too. People are harder to fall in love with, more complicated, so imprecise. It's harder to see the patterns, but it's also more rewarding, watching people, the eddies and currents of humanity swirling around the streets. Andi loves the city and so she walks out of NYU with a double major in sociology and mathematics, and ends up with an MA in demographics before she even really thinks about what she wants to do with her life.

The FBI comes to her. It pays less then the consulting firms and the politicians, but Andi takes the job anyway, because it lets her put demographics into action. When Human Trafficking snaps her up two years into the job, she thinks she’s found the perfect job. They appreciate the way she can change numbers back into people, and she loves the challenge. Helping people is a plus, too.

And for the first couple years it is. She's the department's golden child, her numbers and her demographics are the wave of the future. She gets her idiot heroics out of the way young, at least, and it only costs her a flesh wound: a through and through that misses all her vital organs. It haunts her a little, just enough to make her cautious, not enough for her lose her edge. Still, she runs the numbers in her head over and over, thinking of two inches to the left and an FBI funeral. What she does lose is that aura of invincibility, the certainty that she’ll always be right. Still, when Evans steps down, she lets them make her the head of Human Trafficking.

It’s the politics that grinds her down. Fighting with INS after good cases, and with her own demons after bad ones. Containers full of dead bodies, little girls flinching away from their rescuers, people who just wanted a chance at a hope of a new life, people who never had the chance to hope at all. It leaves her tired and worn. She works harder and longer hours. There is always someone who needs to be saved, there is always something more that Andi can do.

There are good days though, and this is certainly one of them. Seven victims found, seventeen scumbags arrested, and an entire cell wiped out. Her agent is safe, if injured, and she's not going to have to call anyone's mother with condolences. The BAU does good work, and so when Morgan and Reid stop by to ask her if she wants to join them all for dinner, she smiles, and goes gladly.

  


taken by sayan51


End file.
